Tuesday, August 17, 2004

A nice crit for my work - thanks chris!

A beautifully made, hand sewn chapbook. Stunning artwork on cover, a rectangle of splashes, dashes, swirls of color, which might best be described with a fragment of the poetry as "beyond the difference/ trapped in vision" ("I. A Vision"). The poems fairly take off from there, each with Jones customary precision and care for word and deed in life experience. This is a poet with not only ear and eye fully committed to work together in/on the poem, but the entire body of being is ever present, fully an art, then, not only committing distinctly differing parts to the whole, but of engaged commitment to the larger social body of ideas, not least of which that of self-reflective questions of temporal presence, transcendence and influenced by cultural habituation:

...
But still a consumer
the constant capture
shelves my handy packets.
(Can we still talk?)
The boys, the queens
unhappy together.
Are these the years?
...

(I. "A Vision," 6)

Here is more of what I sense on these somewhat quiet, yet heady and so welcome matters of body, its perceptive partialities, its sensual intellect splashed into being:

II. Colours swim

What sort of eyes
I must have now
to see past these streaks
of eden.

Black outlines
in which vision
& nbsp; swims
a cotton that covers
sleep.

Quick wings
pass branches
settle on air
tiny green-backed flies
and memory
is still a colour.

Cloud sky
yellow as an old summer.

The squealing yards
kids again.

(7)

So compelling, this poetry: it makes me want to be a "green-backed fly" or at least, a "memory"!

Congratulations, Jill, and Randolph of Wild Honey, for this wonder of a book.